What can we say about Ben Carson? He has a way of letting words go from his brain to his mouth without any sort of filter in between. This has led to some really sad and ridiculous remarks. Like the time he said that he’d have been able to stop a shooter or that operating on “old geezers” is a waste of time or… well, all of these. Carson has just made stuff up; like the Chinese being in Syria. He asks kids to point out the dumbest one in their class. And then he whines about it when we quote his exact words, in context.

Today, Carson did it again. Speaking to Stephen K. Bannon on “Breitbart News Daily” on Friday, Carson accused the Democrats of keeping black Americans dependent so that Dems can get the black vote. Carson said that the “obeisance” of black voters to the Democratic party has caused “poverty and broken homes.”

This is the Democratic party’s plan all along, Carson claimed. Because black Americans need to be impoverished to vote Democrat:

Throwing away faith and family are deleterious to any community and it’s extra devastating on the black community. And I believe that many people of the people [sic] who are trying to cultivate their votes know that and are intentionally destroying those pillars of strength to keep people in a dependent position.

Now, hang on just a frigging minute. It was Democrats who pushed through the Civil Rights Act, without which, black voters in the South would still be taking tests and paying poll taxes to be able to vote. If it were up to Republicans, that is exactly where they’d be. Oh, wait… the five Supreme Court throwbacks are working on that one.

Faith and family are important among black Americans, that’s true. The second part of that equation is impacted heavily by the prison industry, with 1 in 12 black men aged 25-54 in prison. Odds are, they are in there for not being able to pay a parking ticket or another non-violent crime. The Democratic party isn’t responsible for this. Though they share some of the blame, the privatization of prisons is a dearly held tenet of the GOP. And when human life is monetized, it becomes a commodity. The for-profit prison system needs inmates and, usually, they are brown and poor and male.

The idea that the Democratic party is trying to keep a segment of the population in poverty so that they will then vote for them is nonsense. There are many reasons why any American is living in poverty. One of the biggest is a non-living wage, something that raising the minimum wage would help alleviate. But Ben Carson doesn’t support that.

Why do black people vote the way they do? Probably because they recognize that, out of the two major political parties, only one gives a damn about them. And, baby, it ain’t the Republicans.